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Subscriptions Drive Views of Extremist Videos on YouTube
As the second most popular social media platform in the world, YouTube frequently attracts criticism. In particular, critics argue that its algorithmic recommendations facilitate radicalization and extremism by sending users down “rabbit holes” of harmful content.
“YouTube’s algorithms may not be recommending alternative and extremist content to nonsubscribers very often, but they are nonetheless hosting it for free and funneling it to subscribers in ways that are of great concern,” says co-author Brendan Nyhan, the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor at Dartmouth. All participants who opted in provided informed consent to allow anonymized tracking of their web browsing behavior in Chrome or Firefox from July to December 2020, with various security protocols in place. By contrast, the researchers found that recommendations to alternative and extremist channel videos were very rare and that “rabbit hole”-type events were only observed a handful of times during the study period.
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